Scholars have gone to great lengths to explain the persistence of the South as a collective in multilateral bargaining. The conventional framing of the puzzle has been: why do countries agree to bargain as a collective and reach sub-optimal lowest common denominator outcomes when other strategies would have provided better outcomes? In his presentation, Rishi will show that this puzzle may no longer hold by putting the ‘resilience of the South’ to test with evidence from the climate regime.

Rishi Bhandary is a doctoral candidate at The Fletcher School, focusing on climate change, energy policy, and international negotiations. His research interests include innovative sources of finance and market-based strategies for low carbon development. He also studies multilateral climate change negotiations as well as Track 2 initiatives on climate change. He received his Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from Fletcher and completed his undergraduate education in Quantitative Economics and International Relations from Tufts University. He has worked for the Ministry of Forests, Nepal, and the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility at the World Bank and was an Avantha Fellow at the Aspen Institute India. In 2011, he was awarded a fellowship by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School to study alliance formation in climate change negotiations.